‘BJP distorting history’

Web Archive | November 14, 2013 6:09 pm

In party mouthpiece editorial, CPM slams efforts at ‘misappropriation’
STATESMAN NEWS SERVICE
New Delhi, 14 November
The CPI-M has said BJP Prime Ministerial-aspirant Narendra Modi, in his eagerness to “create history”, was brazenly distorting history by projecting “make-believe circumstances”.
In an editorial in the forthcoming issue of its journal, People&’s Democracy, the party attacked BJP leaders’ “attempts to distort history,” and said the BJP&’s current efforts at “misappropriating” Sardar Patel was part of its overall objective of re-writing Indian history “to straightjacket it into a monolithic record of the glorification of the “Hindu Nation”.
Apart from trying to project himself as the protégé of Sardar Patel, Mr Modi claimed at a rally in Patna that Takshashila, now part of Pakistan, was in Bihar, the CPI-M editorial said.
Mr Modi claimed, it said, “that Jawaharlal Nehru stayed away from Sardar Patel&’s funeral because of irresolvable political differences. He was forced to retract this untruth. Later, he had to once again apologise for a grave historical distortion when he claimed that Shyama Prasad Mookerjee died more than two decades earlier than he actually died and that he was a proud son of Gujarat.”
Not to be left behind, the CPI-M said, senior BJP leader L K Advani too joined this process of distortion of history and quoted a book by one M K K Nair that claimed that Nehru called Patel a ‘communalist’ during the discussions on the police action in the state of Hyderabad.
“What are the facts of history? Such a cabinet meeting, it is claimed, happened in April 1948. Mr M K K Nair joined the IAS only in 1949,” the CPI-M said.
The party said Mr Advani also claimed that the then Indian Army Chief, Sir Roy Bucher, was asked to resign on grounds that he tipped off the Pakistani Army Chief, another Englishman, over the impending police action in Hyderabad in September 1948.
“The truth is Bucher continued to be the Army Chief till 15 January, 1949 when Gen Cariappa took over,” the CPI-M said.
The editorial said however much they might try to distort history, in the pursuit of their project of converting the secular democratic Indian Republic into their concept of a ‘Hindu Rashtra’, the RSS/BJP would not succeed, if the people continued to struggle for a better secular democratic India.